LIKE MOST big-time movie directors, Kasi Lemmons had a studio driver to take her to and from the set of her new film, “Talk to Me.” So driver and passenger did some chatting and one of the their conversations stuck in her mind. “He said he’d driven 130 directors,” Lemmons recalled. “And I was the first woman director he’d driven.”

The number-crunching of a lone limo driver is hardly scientific. But when it comes to women directors, Hollywood is full of depressing statistics that support the chauffeur’s observations. Of the 8,500 directors represented in the Directors Guild of America (DGA), about 13 percent are women. That figure includes women who work in television, which has long been considered a more welcoming environment.

According to Dr. Martha Lauzen, the number of women directors working in film is just

7 percent.

Lauzen, a San Diego State University professor who has been tracking the industry for 10 years, publishes an annual study she calls “The Celluloid Ceiling,” which tracks gender for the casts and crews of the top 250 films released in North America every year.

For a more personal example of the statistical imbalance, consider the case of Sofia Coppola. When she was nominated for best director for her 2003 film “Lost in Translation,” she became the first American woman to receive that honor in Academy history. Factor in the foreign directors who’ve been nominated and Coppola was still only the third woman. And to date, the last.

When Lemmons was interviewing her director of photography on “Talk to Me,” a biographical picture about Petey Greene, the dynamic ex-felon who put talk radio on the map in the 1960s Washington, D.C., she asked if he had experience working for a woman at the helm. The cinematographer, Stephane Fontaine, said she’d be his sixth. Pleasantly surprised, Lemmons asked, “How is that possible?” Fontaine had worked mostly in Europe, where he told her that approximately a third of the directors are women.

“It was an incredible moment for me to realize, hmm, we’re having a Hollywood problem,” Lemmons said. “And you wonder, what’s wrong with Hollywood?”

This is a song that has been sung before. Ad nauseum. At a round-table DGA discussion about the dearth of women directors last summer, “Clueless” director Amy Heckerling, who has been in the business for more than 25 years, said: “It’s getting so boring. It’s like ‘Roe v. Wade.’ We’re fighting for that again?”

But every time new statistics are released, reflecting minimal, if any, progress, the conversation starts up again. The Alliance of Women Film Journalists (of which this reporter is a member) was so disheartened by the lack of women filmmakers on the American Film Institute’s recent Tenth annual 100 Greatest Films List — of 400 films nominated, just 41/2 were directed by women (one was co-directed with a man) — that the group decided to create its own list of great films. Released at the end of June, AWFJ’s list includes Heckerling (twice) as well as films made by Mira Nair, Jane Campion, Gillian Armstrong and Sofia Coppola.

Wary of labels

All of the female directors interviewed for this article spoke passionately about the disparity in the numbers in the industry. But being labeled as “women directors” made them uncomfortable.

“I’m just a director who happens to be a woman,” said Zoe Cassavetes, whose first feature, “Broken English,” a romantic comedy starring Parker Posey as a neurotic Manhattanite who has nearly given up on finding love, opened in Bay Area theaters last week.

“If you are in command of what you are doing, all that stuff falls away. But then half of me is like, ‘There should be more women directors! Why do you think there aren’t many women directors?'”

There are powerful women directors in Hollywood, people like Nancy Meyers (“The Holiday”) and Nora Ephron (“You’ve Got Mail”) who are practically brands in and of themselves. But looking at a Web site called The Numbers, which tracks directors by how much their films have grossed, it’s hard not to notice the sparseness of the female names on the list. If you pull out the women and rank them by their grosses, Lemmons is No. 21. She’s made three films, “Caveman’s Valentine,” “Eve’s Bayou” and “Dr. Hugo,” which is about average for the list.

For whatever reason, even the top women directors don’t make that many films. Martha Coolidge, No. 9 on the list and the first woman to serve as president of the DGA, has made the most — 11 films. Next come Penny Marshall and Amy Heckerling, with seven each. That seems like a lot, until you consider that Steven Spielberg is hard at work directing his 46th film.

Women’s movies

Generalizations are always risky, but female directors do tend to make what are often referred to as women’s movies, smaller stories about relationships — like “Broken English” — or social issues. These movies are perceived to have limited audience appeal.

A classic example is “Stephanie Daley,” an intense film about a teenager (Amber Tamblyn) who hides a pregnancy, gives birth in a bathroom and then faces murder charges. While it opened last month to very strong reviews — the Wall Street Journal’s Joe Morgenstern called it “spellbinding” — it was booked into just one theater in the Bay Area, and for a one-week engagement.

The same thing happened earlier this year to Karen Moncrieff’s “The Dead Girl,” a much lauded film about a murdered prostitute. Laurie Collyer’s “Sherrybaby,” which featured a Golden Globe-nominated performance by Maggie Gyllenhaal as a convict trying to reclaim her child after a stint in prison, had only a limited theatrical run last fall before going to DVD. These are films that are considered “hard sells.”

They all feature strong female leads.

“My fundamental line is that what we make true becomes true,” said “Stephanie Daley” writer/

director Hilary Brougher. “Since the belief is that ‘Stephanie Daley’ is a hard sell, it becomes a hard sell. If we believe that women will see men’s movies but men won’t see women’s movies then that becomes true.”

“I can get a million good reviews,” said Brougher, who won the top screenwriting award at Sundance in 2006. “But unless there are marketing dollars to bolster that, it doesn’t mean anything.”

“Personally,” she said, “I don’t really even know what the term ‘woman’s movie’ really means. I do know the term gives me a vague stomach ache.”

Delpy’s journey

Actress Julie Delpy has wanted to be a director since she was 17, when she wrote her first script. In 1992, having acted for great filmmakers such as Jean-Luc Godard and Krzysztof Kieslowski, she went to the NYU film school. She did well and graduated eager to get behind the camera. Years later, all she had to show for it was a short film and a indie feature that never saw theatrical release in the U.S.

She also had a drawer full of scripts that reflected her love of science fiction and other non-girlie topics. She couldn’t get any of them produced. “I was kind of losing hope,” she said.

Then a friend suggested she write a script that bore some similarity to “Before Sunset,” the successful 2004 film Delpy had starred in and co-written. She had shared an Oscar nomination for

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she admits it has always been hard for her to “sell” herself as a director.

“Not only am I a woman, but I don’t go pushing myself on them saying, listen, I’m a genius,” she said.

“Or hey, man, this movie is going to make a lot of money. I don’t believe anyone can know that… I don’t believe it is honest. But you can’t be honest in this business.”

Battling stereotypes

Just as in any other industry with a glass ceiling, women have to struggle against stereotypes — like the one that says women just aren’t as good at managing money — and beliefs that stem from centuries of patriarchal domination. Take Cassavetes. You’d think it would be nerve-wracking to put a movie out there when your iconic father made seminal films such as “A Woman Under the Influence” and “Faces.” But Cassavetes said that her brother Nick is the Cassavetes’ offspring who has to deal with that bugaboo.

“There is probably more pressure on him to be John Cassavetes’ son,” she said. “I’m a girl. At the end of the day, I’m a chick and he’s the son.”

She laughed, a rich throaty laugh that sounded a lot like her famous mother’s. Then she brought up the issue that is most frequently cited as the reason women directors don’t have careers like Martin Scorsese’s or Spielberg’s: family.

“By the time you get to direct your movie it is time to have a baby,” Cassavetes said. It took her five years to get “Broken English” made. “Both take a lot of energy. It is just part of the deal.”

Good scripts are coming her way now, and she’s excited to make another film. But, she says, “I’m 36 years old and I want to have a kid.”

Babies don’t preclude moviemaking — just ask Collyer, who directed “Sherrybaby” when she was in her sixth and seventh months of pregnancy — but they can make it more complicated. In that Directors Guild round-table discussion last fall, Holofcener admitted she’d be more ambitious if she didn’t have kids.

Even Mimi Leder said her family has kept her out of the schmooze scene, where the next job is often found.

Motherhood does change careers. But not, by any means, necessarily for the worse. Brougher, who has 5-year-old twins, said she didn’t want to be pigeon-holed as a “touchy-feely mom director.” “But I have learned a lot from being a mother, and I’m not afraid to bring that to the set.

“It’s odd talking about why there aren’t more women directors,” she wrote in an e-mail after an earlier interview, “Once we start giving name to possible reasons, it can re-enforce our otherness.

“I got very lucky on ‘Stephanie Daley,’ ” she said. “That’s why I can never really complain. I knew it was a hard movie to make. I honestly wasn’t even sure we’d ever get it made. I would have loved for it to take off, but I actually feel heartened by what it means to be a woman filmmaker.”

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